Letters to the Editor
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What Someone on the Cusp of Generations X and Y Sees in Castaneda
I am 28, and it is interesting to read the other letters about Castaneda and see the generation-grounded or culture-grounded criticisms thrown back and forth. I read Castaneda in college and, while it doesn't surprise me, it never occurred to me that his books were symbols of hippies or counter-culture. The drug use and sexual "rituals" described in the books make that a reasonable assumption in the context of the 60s.
Univ. of Virginia Prof. Roy Wagner taught a course in the school's anthropology department on the Castaneda books, and I knew Professor Wagner's reputation as an interesting mind in anthropology and an eccentric personality. Prof. Wagner taught the course--perhaps hugely tongue-in-cheek--in a very earnest manner. However, this earnest (or maybe just dead-pan) method was not applied so much as to anthropoligic elements, but to storytelling in general, and even some of the mystical phenomena in particular. Wagner first instructed us to skip the entire first section of the first book--to discard Castaneda's own "earnest" anthropolical writing and analysis of culture, ritual, etc. The real storytelling began in the second half of the first book, and continued from there, uninterrupted by any more "serious" anthropology.
At times, Wagner would even state that he had experienced the mystical phenomena discussed in the books, or at least attested to their "reality." But, perhaps because I began the course with a mindset combining jovial adventurism and passive skepticism, it didn't matter to me what Wagner said about the phenomena. I think what Prof. Wagner intended to impart--and certainly what I took--was the more metaphorical meaning of storytelling, using the specific episodes as disguised lessons concerning particular points of broad human philosophical arguments. The books are filled with obvious parallels to the issues tackled by Plato, Neitzche, Heidegger, and the deconstructionists. In a way, I see these books as taking more sophisticated and opaque tacks towards philosophy as recent pop-culture movies like The Matrix, or any Charlie Kaufman work.
For these reasons, I found Castaneda's books to be both illuminating - if only fables - and hellaciously fun reads to boot. Perhaps I give him (and Prof. Wagner) too much credit in assuming that the motives were more sophisticated and intentionnally metaphorical. But that's sort of the point-we take out what we put in, we often see meaning differently, and at the same time, the same symbols may also function universally.